Love is the same as friendship; it's based on loyalty, trust, respect and love for each. Most people say they are in love but do they actually know the meaning of love? What love is or what the word love means? Have they perhaps sat down and examine the difference between a true love from the heart and lust?

It has often been said that love, both sacred and profane, is the only true subject of the lyric poem. Nothing better justifies this claim than the splendid poems in this volume, which range from the writings of ancient China to those of modern-day America and represent, at its most piercing, a universal experience of the human soul. Includes poems by John Donne, Christina Rossetti, W. H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Graves, e. e. cummings, Dorothy Parker, William Shakespeare, Sappho, Bhartrhari, Anna Akhmatova, and W. B. Yeats, among many others.

Longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation An historic publication in which the legendary German poet and dramatist emerges, quite like Goethe, as a poet driven by Eros. Bertolt Brecht is widely considered the greatest German playwright of the twentieth century, and to this day remains best known as a dramatist, the author of Mother Courage, The Threepenny Opera, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, among so many other works. However, Brecht was also a hugely prolific and eclectic poet, producing more than 2,000 poems during his lifetime—indeed, so many that even his own wife, Helene Weigel, had no idea just how many he had written. "A thieving magpie of much of world literature," the full scope and variety of his poetic output did not become apparent until after his death. Now, the English-speaking world can access part of his stunning body of work in Love Poems, the first volume in a monumental undertaking by award-winning translators David Constantine and Tom Kuhn to translate Brecht's poetic legacy into English. Love Poems collects his most intimate and romantic poems, many of which were banned in German in the 1950s for their explicit eroticism. Written between 1918 and 1955, these poems reflect an artist driven not only by the bitter and violent politics of his age but, like Goethe, by the untrammeled forces of love, romance, and erotic desire. In a 1966 New Yorker article, Hannah Arendt wrote of Brecht that he had "staked his life and his art as few poets have ever done." In these 78 poems, we see Brecht's astonishing and deeply personal love poems—including 22 never before published in English—many addressed to particular women, which show Brecht as lover and love poet, engaged in a bitter struggle to keep faith, hope, and love alive during desperate times. Featuring a personal foreword by Barbara Brecht-Schall, his last surviving child, Love Poems reveals Brecht as not merely one of the most famous playwrights of the twentieth century but also one of its most fiercely creative poets.

Translations of Ovid's love poems.

A FINALIST FOR THE PEN/WEST TRANSLATION AWARD The 100th Anniversary Edition of a global classic, containing beautiful translations along with the original German text. While visiting Russia in his twenties, Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the twentieth century's greatest poets, was moved by a spirituality he encountered there. Inspired, Rilke returned to Germany and put down on paper what he felt were spontaneously received prayers. Rilke's Book of Hours is the invigorating vision of spiritual practice for the secular world, and a work that seems remarkably prescient today, one hundred years after it was written. Rilke's Book of Hours shares with the reader a new kind of intimacy with God, or the divine—a reciprocal relationship between the divine and the ordinary in which God needs us as much as we need God. Rilke influenced generations of writers with his Letters to a Young Poet, and now Rilke's Book of Hours tells us that our role in the world is to love it and thereby love God into being. These fresh translations rendered by Joanna Macy, a mystic and spiritual teacher, and Anita Barrows, a skilled poet, capture Rilke's spirit as no one has done before.

In trailblazing poet, essayist, teacher and activist June Jordan's poems, love is a vision of revolutionary solidarity, crossing borders both emotional and literal with an outstretched hand. Haruko traces the faltering arc of a passionate love affair with another woman while Love Poems encompasses relationships with men and women, political resistance, the need for self-care in a demanding, uncaring world and apocalyptic visions of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum. A contemporary of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, June Jordan's spectacular poetry remains profoundly politically potent, lyrically inventive and breathtakingly romantic. First published in 1994, Haruko/ Love poems is a vitally important modern classic.